AUTHLIB

Working Papers

Ideologies of
Autocratization

Zsolt Enyedi
AUTHLIB Working Papers

Series 2023:1

February 2023

About the AUTHLIB Working Papers

The AUTHLIB Working Papers present preliminary results from ongoing research prior to
final publication. The series seeks to facilitate the exchange of ideas and to stimulate
discussion about work in progress between the AUTHLIB core team and affiliates, the
academic community working on the varieties of threats and challenges to liberal democracy
in Europe as well as on possible avenues to counter them, and the interested public. It
provides an opportunity for the AUTHLIB team and researchers affiliated with consortium
members to disseminate and receive feedback on their work. It also showcases the complex
focus of AUTHLIB’s inquiries to the academic and general public.

The AUTHLIB Working Papers are published in the framework of the project AUTHLIB –
Neo-Authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response funded by the
European Union and UK Research and Innovation. Views and opinions expressed are those
of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union, UK Research
and Innovation, AUTHLIB consortium member, or the AUTHLIB Working Papers’ editorial
board, none of whom can be held responsible for them.

AUTHLIB Working Papers are available in an electronic format at www.authlib.eu.

Copyright © 2023 by authors. All rights reserved.

 Ideologies of Autocratization

Zsolt Enyedi

Abstract

This paper discusses the ideological modules of the recent wave of autocratization. It detects
the emergence of still fragmented but increasingly robust illiberal alternatives. The illiberal
discourse is anti-universalist but typically not openly anti-democratic. It gains much of its
traction from a backlash against progressive victories in the culture wars. Appropriating anti-
colonial arguments, it advocates the coexistence of different political regimes while it
venerates homogeneity and the centralization of power within national borders. While shifts
towards autocratic structures can be non-ideological, the ideological modules of paternalist
populism, illiberal conservatism and, in certain parts of the world, civilizationist
ethnocentrism constitute ideational layers that help the cause of autocratizers.

About the author

Zsolt Enyedi studied comparative social sciences, history, sociology and political science in
Budapest and Amsterdam. The focus of his research interests is on party politics, comparative
government, church and state relations, and political psychology (especially authoritarianism,
prejudices, and political tolerance). His articles have appeared in journals such as Political
Psychology, European Journal of Political Research, Political Studies, West European Politics,
Party Politics, Political Studies, Europe-Asia Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Journal
of Ideologies, and European Review. Zsolt Enyedi was the 2003 recipient of the Rudolf
Wildenmann Prize and the 2004 winner of the Bibó Award. He was a fellow at the Woodrow
Wilson Center (Washington DC), Kellogg Institute (Notre Dame University), the Netherlands
Institute for Advanced Studies (Wassenaar), the European University Institute (Florence), the
Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, Department of Politics and
International Relations and Pembroke College, University of Oxford. His most recent book,
Party System Closure, co-authored with Fernando Casal Bertoa, was published by Oxford
University Press in 2021.

1
 Introduction

Ideological discourse is often used to hide materialistic motives. When Hitler attacked the
Soviet Union he used the language of anti-Bolshevism. In response, Stalin mobilized his
people against the possible return of landlords, capitalists and the tsar. The historical record
shows that at the moment of the German invasion these politicians were mainly concerned
about the control of the oilfields and granaries in Ukraine, southern Russia and the Caucasus
and, indirectly, about their own grip on power.
Mindful of the potential gap between words and true motives, contemporary
observers are often sceptical about the utility of ideas for making sense of political processes.
This perspective is problematic as there is no such thing as politics without ideological
elements. Neither there is, of course, politics driven exclusively by ideological considerations.
The task of the analysts is to identify the specific ideological templates used by political
actors and to assess their significance.
As far as the recent wave of autocratization is concerned, the aversion to ideology-
focused analyses is particularly conspicuous. The emphasis of the scholarship tends to be on
the logic of power-grabbing and on kleptocratic rule (Lewis 2022). Ideological aspects are
neglected for three major reasons. First, thanks to media penetration, we know more than in
the past about the facts behind the façades of political propaganda, such as the work of spin
doctors, the details of the wealth-accumulation by leaders or the behind-the-scenes
collaboration of business and political elites. Second, the currently autocratizing countries
are led by political actors with diverse ideological affiliations. Third, no elaborate and explicit
anti-democratic ideology has emerged (yet) in the current wave of autocratization. While the
third wave of democratization produced convergence on the model of liberal democracy, and
the post-1989 transitions were particularly dominated by the glorification of human rights
and the market economy, the current autocratic challenges to liberal democracy come from
various ideological corners.
Ideology had an asymmetric role already during the Cold War. While half of the planet
identified as communist or socialist, the other half had no similar unifying frame. Anti-
communism was often a central tenet for these regimes, but this was true for both
democracies and autocracies. The right-wing and authoritarian regimes were diverse in their
ideological appeals: some emphasised nationalism while others legitimized themselves with
religious fundamentalism or hierarchical law-and-order policies, and many were structured
around the defence of inherited post-feudal structures or the operating principle of military
rule.

2
 The disparate conglomerate of right-wing regimes started losing its members after
the democratic transition in Portugal, while the communist alternative collapsed in one go.
But at the end of the 2000s the transitory expansion of liberal democratic norms reversed.
Today checks and balances, pluralism and individual rights are under threat in the majority
of the countries of the world (Boese et al. 2022; Lührmann and Lindberg 2019). The policies
and ideas used to undermine these institutions and norms can be analysed under the
umbrella term ‘illiberalism’ (Laruelle 2022; Sajó et al. 2021).
Illiberalism is typically conceptualized as a mixture of practices and ideological
elements (Kauth and King 2020). In this paper the emphasis will be on the latter; that is, on
ideas that question the equality of citizens, freedom of expression, state neutrality, the rule
of law, checks and balances, media pluralism and non-discrimination based on ethnicity,
sexual orientation, gender or race. Ideology is understood here as a recurring and interrelated
pattern of ideas on which public policy proposals can be based (Freeden 2003). It is outside
of the scope of this paper to investigate how long-standing and stable the respective ideas
and their linkages are (Freeden 1996, 2017). None of the discussed ideological modules
amounts to a full-fledged, monolithic and fully integrated template akin to Marxist socialism,
Thomist Christian integralism or Rawlsian liberalism, but they all have an intellectual and
normative core that has the potential to structure political actions beyond materialistic cost-
benefit calculations. The paper is aimed at identifying such core ideas.
To the extent one finds common ideas across various illiberal initiatives, they may
follow both from these initiatives’ joint opposition to liberal democracy and from learning
from each other. ‘Authoritarian learning’ does not require purposefully designed institutions
and arenas, but it can be facilitated by various structures of education and international
cooperation. Organizations such as the World Congress of Families (WCF) or Marion
Maréchal Le Pen’s Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences (ISSEP) offer a radical
conservative critique of liberal democracy, while institutions like the Conservative Political
Action Conference (CPAC), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA),
the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Organization of Turkic
States (OTS), or the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) provide venues for politicians to
exchange ideas and to forge ties of solidarity. As the list above indicates, these organizations
cater for different actors: the illiberal front is fragmented. But they sometimes converge on
common enemy figures, such as the millionaire philanthropist businessman George Soros,
and borrow specific arguments and solutions from each other.

3
 1. Left or right

As it follows from the previous section, it is not possible to arrive to a blanket assertion on
the left-right profile of the current autocratic wave. But it is possible to point to the
prevalence of right-wing cultural and left-wing economic values in the rhetoric of many of
the political actors concerned and to argue for the primacy of the former. Autocratic projects
tend to justify themselves by criticizing the inability of liberal democracies to achieve social
and cultural integration, but the concerns about social cohesion rarely lead to the
implementation of traditional left-wing economic policies.
In fact, the most clearly right-wing examples of illiberal projects, such as Alberto
Fujimori’s in Perú or Jair Bolsonaro’s in Brazil, can be even said to have defended in an illiberal
way some elements of the liberal order, primarily its economic aspects. Accordingly, these
leaders were backed by educated and well-to-do social segments of the society (Mafei et al.
2021). In a similar vein, in the Philippines the left-wing populism of President Joseph Estrada
was countered by President Rodrigo Duterte’s more unequivocally illiberal right-wing
populism. Duterte’s anti-elitist rhetoric (directed especially against journalists, human rights
lawyers and international actors) was popular exactly because the educated middle classes
feared the corruption and chaos associated with left-wing populism (Garrido 2022; Rüland
2022).
Right-wing illiberals typically use some modernized version of the old anti-communist
rhetoric. This discourse is most pronounced where the radical left is a serious alternative, like
parts of Latin America, but it is also present in post-communist countries where it primarily
expresses a rivalry with forces that can be described as successors of the defunct communist
establishment.
On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Latin America’s populist politicians like
Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, Nicolás Maduro or Rafael Correa justified their authoritarian
measures, such as the extension of their own term limits, with the fight against the economic
oligarchy. Even more importantly, their rhetoric focused on the emancipation of marginalized
social groups, in sharp contrast to the right-wing versions of illiberalism. The lowest common
denominator for left-wing autocratizers is provided by the language of egalitarianism
combined with anti-Americanism (Alarcón et al. 2016; Chaguaceda 2021; Corrales 2020; de
la Torre 2010; Garcia-Holgado and Perez-Linan 2021; Landau 2021; Moffitt 2016).
The complexity of the relationship between the left-right spectrum and illiberalism is
exacerbated by two factors: the blurred profile of some of the illiberal parties and the
illiberalism of some of the centrist political forces. India, one of the most significant examples
among recent autocratizers, is a good example of the first factor. The traditionally ruling
Congress party that represented social elites and marginalised social groups (similarly to the

4
Democrats in the United States) was successfully challenged by the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) led by Narendra Modi. The BJP gave voice to the anxieties surrounding the positive
discrimination in favour of the Hindu lowest castes under Congress’s rule. These policies
were seen as dysfunctional and unfair even by many citizens who lived in modest
circumstances. The rolling back of the system under Modi has been accompanied by a
combination of neoliberal economic policies and of the distribution of tangible goods to the
poor, creating a broad cross-class support for the BJP (Ganguly 2020; Jaffrelot 2022; Maerz
et al. 2020; Varshney 2019). But while on economic issues the BJP’s ideology is a complex
one, culturally it is unequivocally right-wing, embracing extreme versions of Hindu
nationalism and inviting citizens to think of themselves not in economic but in ethnoreligious
terms.
The second factor is represented by shifts towards autocratic structures under
nominally centrist leaderships. In Bulgaria under Boyko Borisov a centre-right liberal office-
holder relied on authoritarian measures, while in Serbia and Slovakia nominally leftist
governing parties did the same. Notably, neither of these actors developed a comprehensive
critique of liberal democracy (Cianetti et al. 2018; Dawson and Hanley 2016). Indonesia is
another case of ‘silent autocratization’: under the pragmatic and initially liberal Joko Widodo
(Jokowi) civil liberties were gradually restricted without much fanfare.

2. Attacks on universalism and globalism, lip service to democracy

The search for commonalities behind this bewildering variation must start with the
acknowledgment that, historically speaking, the current wave of autocratizers is
distinguished by their formal acceptance of democratic rules and principles. Executive
aggrandizement, the unwillingness to guarantee a level playing field in the political arena,
and the frequent and often arbitrary disrespect of the constitutional limits on governments
and of citizens’ rights question the genuineness of their democratic orientation, but the
difference compared to the interwar anti-democratic template is undeniable. The
emphatically elitist worldviews have not been reinvigorated in the current democratic
regress, even if, as discussed below, bottom-up legitimization is often tempered by various
top-down concerns.
The proliferation of labels such as electoral autocracy, defective democracy, hybrid
regime, competitive authoritarianism and illiberal democracy shows the lack of clear dividing
lines between dictatorship and democracy in contemporary politics. In this context the
acceptance of democratic rule can mean two things: maintenance of formally democratic

5
 procedures and/or appeal to the will of the people. While the first is often a practical
necessity, the second can be considered to be a properly ideological element.
The evocation of bottom-up legitimacy is often linked to freedom-of-speech
arguments against imposed political correctness. Today’s illiberals devote considerable
energy to identifying instances of violation of freedoms by liberal democratic regimes and of
biases and censorship within the (international) media. They embrace the values of pluralism
and tolerance in a very specific and narrow sense of these words: by objecting to the
progressive regulations of private and public affairs and by advocating for a multipolar world
in which different regimes coexist.
This partial (and often superficial) borrowing from liberal discourse is combined with
a profoundly anti-universalistic orientation. Universalism is one of the most visible and
provocative hallmarks of the liberal democratic order. It is a provocative ideological
orientation because it sits uneasily with national sovereignty, localism and religion-based
political identities. It also has, historically speaking, a Western flavour, a fact exploited by
autocratizers in non-Western regions.
A prominent authoritarian alternative constructed along these lines is the one framed
in terms of ‘Asian values’. According to this template human rights are products of historical
developments and are contingent on local conditions (Chang 2021; Davis 1998). ‘Asian
values’ imply a prioritization of society and family above the individual, consensus and social
harmony over contention, and collective safety over individual freedom. They also entail the
veneration of a paternalistic, economically active and, in terms of values, non-neutral state
(Bourchier 2019; Ghai 2000; Ginsburg 2021; Jones et al. 1995; Mahbubhani 1992). To justify
restrictions on criticism of authorities, the surveillance of the citizens and the hierarchically
organized, collectivistic vision of the state-society nexus, the autocratizers tend to refer to a
combination of cultural legacies and technocratic efficiency.
While the Asian specificities are often interpreted in civilizational terms by analysts
and actors alike, it is obvious that the scepticism about the constraints on state power travels
well across Confucian, Muslim or Catholic boundaries, as reflected by the dominance of the
raison d’état over individual freedoms in constitutions from China to Indonesia (Bourchier
2015; Mudhoffir and Hadiz 2021).
The countries where this ideological discourse is most elaborate, such as Malaysia or
Singapore, are in the forefront of demonstrating that modernization is possible in a non-
Western way. But these countries are not among the most autocratic ones in the region. In
fact, rulers proclaiming ‘Asian values’ often face radical challenges from fundamentalist
ideologies that reject the supremacy of social harmony and call for less tolerance and more
bottom-up legislation. Ironically, these approaches, while being more hostile towards the

6
West, overlap with the American and European radical right in their readiness to polarize
public debates and in adopting an agonistic vision of society in general.
The illiberal stance against universalism also shapes attitudes towards globalization.
While some of the countries undergoing autocratization benefit economically from
globalization, most of their leaders rally against globalism and globalization-induced
multiculturalism (Ganga 2021). In case of states that benefit most from international trade,
such as China, this involvement limits the officials’ willingness to offer an expansive counter-
vision to liberal democracy (Ikenberry 2014). In contrast, in the case of Russia the more
marginal economic position, together with the legacy of messianic role-perception, helped
the development of a more explicit challenge to liberal democracies (Lewis 2020). One of
the central concepts of the Putinist discourse, the ‘Russian world’ (Russkij mir), provides
civilizational boundaries to the regime’s scope of demands, but because it encompasses all
Russian speakers it also legitimizes interference well beyond the country’s borders and
thereby it exacerbates the rhetoric’s expansionist potential (Yatsyk and Makarychev 2022).
In this ideological framework, however, the will of the people is not the most central factor;
sovereignty belongs more to the state than to the people (Laruelle 2022).
In the regions of advanced capitalism anti-globalization sentiments play a different
role within the neo-authoritarian discourses. In the wealthiest and most developed Western
democracies the connection between the substantive rise of inequality and globalization led
to populist, protectionist, nationalist and isolationist movements, supported particularly by
social groups that bore the costs of globalization. During the 2010s Donald Trump became
the main representative of such demands, explicitly contrasting the narrow material interests
of the United States with the existing regime of international trade and military agreements.
While American illiberal initiatives campaign for pulling up the country’s drawbridges
in general, in most other regions autocratizers advocate turning away from particular
geopolitical poles. The most spectacular such U-turn happened in case of Turkey. The Justice
and Development Party led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was originally in favour of European
integration. But during the 2010s confrontation with the European Union became part of the
core identity of the Erdoğan regime. As in many similar instances, this was partly a reaction
to EU’s insistence on issues such as press freedom and the independence of the judiciary
(Taspinar 2014). The same applies to Hungary, a country that developed an equally hostile
rhetoric to ‘Brussels’, even though it remained part of the EU. In general, the Eurosceptic
authoritarian forces within the EU tend not to campaign for an exit but try to slow down the
speed of integration, with the ultimate goal of transforming the EU into a pragmatic economic
intergovernmental enterprise.
While Eurosceptic sentiments became increasingly a staple of illiberal ambitions, anti-
Israel propaganda largely faded away from the agenda of autocratization. This happened in

7
 parallel to the transformation of Israel in an autocratic direction. In Israel the decades-long
presence of anti-minority policies and the ascendence of religious fundamentalist and/or
radical nationalist forces to power received a new impetus from the success of Trumpism.
Inter-community tensions spilled over into issues relevant for political pluralism and civil
rights, leading to attacks against academic freedom, the politicization of judiciary and the
increased governmental control over media, but largely without the adoption of a self-
conscious anti-liberal democracy discourse (Shany and Kremnitzer 2022).
The governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu are paradigmatic examples for the
recent wave of autocratization because they exhibit most clearly the prevailing ‘first things
first’ rhetoric. This ‘realist’ discourse conceptualizes political leaders as responsible for their
own population, and within that for the majority. The job of elected leaders is to assure
economic survival, law and order, demographic sustainability and, in many instances, the
preservation of the cultural legacies that guarantee internal cohesion. Abstract notions, like
freedom of movement or human rights have only marginal place in this role perception. The
realist perspective criticizes liberal legalism for separating law from politics and from
everyday morality and for advancing a dangerous utopianism in the form of universalism
(Blokker 2021). While such ideas have always been convenient for autocrats, the failure of
democracy promotion in various corners of the world, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya, or
Venezuela, provided credence to this more ‘pragmatic’ approach to international affairs.

3. Culture wars

The cultural agenda of the 21st century autocratizers is anchored in the success of
progressive policies across the world, but particularly in advanced capitalist countries,
representing a correction of and a backlash against the robust victories of liberal values.
These victories, beginning in the 1960s but continuing unabated through the turn of the
millennium, led to the growing acceptance of cultural diversity. As the New Left increasingly
focused on identity issues, the authoritarian right also structured its rhetoric around cultural
identities, championing majority identities (Fukuyama 2019). Since the progressive reforms
were driven by educated, socially and physically mobile elites, the resistance adopted a
populist format.
Within the rhetoric of cultural resistance, the fear of replacement by another racial or
ethnic group (immigrants or minorities like the Roma in Eastern Europe or the Muslims in
India) was fused with the fear of being eclipsed by liberated sexual minorities. The growing
visibility of the latter groups does not only represent a challenge to traditional lifestyles and
religious convictions; it also evokes the fear of demographic extinction through the ‘culture

8
of death’ (Mancini and Palazzo 2021). In this frame traditional personal and group identity
are seen to be equally at danger, necessitating proactive measures such as limiting sex
education in schools, banning abortion or constraining NGOs representing sexual minorities
(Querioz et al. 2021).
Benefitting from the backlash against progressivism, autocratizers could effectively
use the language of traditionalism. The type of conservatism they offer is an illiberal version
of classical conservatism that sees contemporary democracy as overly influenced by liberal
values such as internationalism, multiculturalism and human rights. Within the culture-war
context tough-on-crime principles gain new meaning: they can be utilized to serve anti-
immigration and anti-multiculturalism attitudes as foreigners violating domestic moral rules
can be object to incarceration and deportation. In Europe illiberal conservatism is typically
coupled with civilizationist ethnocentrism, an ideological construct within which agency is
attributed to sovereign ethno-cultural units bound together by a civilizationist solidarity,
meaning in the European context the defence of white Christian culture against both
globalization and Islam (Enyedi 2023).
The culture-war logic structures the behaviour even of the ideologically less
fundamentalist autocratizers, such as Donald Trump. His stance against immigration,
abortion and science, or his association with white supremacists, reflected the concerns of
conservative religious believers who felt threatened by progressive racial policies, LGBTQ+
rights and what they perceived as restrictions on religious freedom (Gray 2022; Jamin 2021).
In general, the culturalist rejections of liberal democracy often have religious roots
and/or adopt a religious format, typically manifesting in an opposition to ‘extreme secularism’
of liberal democracy. Some forms of religious resistance target the spirit of individualism,
others the separation of church and state. Virtually all of them criticize the moral relativism
of modern democracies, while, paradoxically, mobilizing against the interference of secular
democratic states into the autonomy of religious communities, an activity that points to the
very opposite of moral relativism.
The trend towards global liberal cultural ascendency provides a boost for the
discourse of re-traditionalization even in regions where there were no local progressive
victories. In Central Asia, for example, the departure from the relative moral conservatism of
the Soviet regime helped both authoritarian rulers and jihadists to make their case. Soviet
conservatism was alien to Islam, and it was even hostile to it, but it did not provoke moral
attitudes in the same way as Western cultural products did, especially in conjunction with
the political chaos, threat of violence, corruption, ethnic tensions, inequality, criminality and
the opaque redistribution of resources that followed the arrival of capitalism (Tucker 2022).
The explicit alliance of illiberal forces and churches is sometimes prevented by the
pro-democratic stance of the clergy. Some leaders, such as Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo

9
 Duterte, were forced to publicly confront a pro-democracy Catholic Church. Pentacostal-
charismatic evangelicalism, on the other hand, emerged as a major cultural resource of
authoritarian politics in Africa (Uganda, Kenya, etc), Latin America (Brazil, Guatemala, etc)
and in North America. This is not so because of specific theological, economic or democracy-
related views held by the movement, but rather due to the involvement of these churches in
the culture wars, placing the majority (though not all) of Evangelicals on the arch-
conservative end of the spectrum, especially on sexual minority rights and abortion. The
Orthodox Church, particularly the leadership of the Russian clergy, takes an essentially
similar position, albeit in a top-down fashion, focusing on resistance against the poisonous
impact of Western values (Frick 2021).
The clearest expression of neo-traditionalism is to be found in the ‘anti-gender’
discourse. This discourse was launched by the Vatican but it quickly spread across
denominations in most regions. It builds on the tradition of anti-feminism while it occasionally
receives the backing of large section of women. In Europe the animosity against sexual
tolerance often goes together, somewhat paradoxically, with the fear of Muslim social views
on gender equality (Dietze and Roth 2020; Pető 2021). The case of Poland is exemplary in
this regard as religious (in this case Catholic) fundamentalism is combined with the fear of
both Western and Islamic influence.

4. The people and the state

Without any doubt, populism is an important layer of the autocratizing ideological discourse
in many corners of the world. The anti-elite discourse has robust, long-lasting traditions in
the United States, but in most other regions it is relatively new, at least as a major organizing
force of political divides. The pernicious side-effects of neoliberal policies, especially the
increase of inequalities, have fostered the plausibility of people-centric appeals of ambitious
autocratic leaders and has helped the radical right to discover the native working class as a
major constituency. In Europe populism capitalized on the cumulation of social challenges,
from the 2008 financial crisis to the 2015 terrorist attacks in France and the refugee crisis of
the same year. In the Western part of the continent the authoritarian breakthrough failed to
materialize, but in Eastern Europe the various crises of legitimacy contributed to the advance
of autocratization in countries such as Hungary and Poland.
But populism is not a central element of the discourse of most autocratic leaders of
Africa, Asia or Russia. And populism is present in many countries only in its specific
paternalist variety. Paternalist populism (Enyedi 2020), championed by leaders such as
Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński, combines the superiority of the popular will with the

10
educational role of the state. While the ideal-typical populist rhetoric is vague on the
definition of the ‘people’, paternalist populism champions governmental support for ‘model
citizens’ (Querioz et al. 2021), a social group whose boundaries are determined in line with
the values and interests of the ruling elite.
The exact balance between populism and paternalism can vary within a single
country. In Italy, for example, the League represents more the populist side, while the
Brothers of Italy, in line with its Fascist roots, the paternalist sensibilities (Albertazzi 2022).
The ‘winning formula’ in most cases is the appeal to the homogeneously conceived people
against the corrupt foreign or foreign-hearted elites, with the promise that the state sides
with the virtuous citizens and takes a leadership role in the fight against foreign interest
groups. The state is envisioned as a force capable of redressing the arbitrariness of the
markets and of resisting the imperialistic intervention of great powers and of international
financial institutions. The paternalist populist approach allows autocrats to channel the
discontent of citizens against neoliberalism (Scheppele 2019).
The ideological construct of paternalist populism overlaps with the ‘Asian values’
agenda in emphasising the community and the obligations to it over individual rights. The
Hungarian ideologue, András Lánczi, for example, praised Viktor Orbán for introducing the
‘system of the meritorious moral relationships’ (Lánczi 2018), in which community assistance
and individual rights are conditioned on fulfilling obligations. As in the ‘Asian values’
template, the community is supposed to be held together by ideological values while the
leader is left relatively free of ideological constraints in order to stay victorious in the struggle
for power (Lánczi 2015; Scheppele 2019). The narrowing of the channels of accountability is
justified with a reference to the need for curbing the pernicious influence of privileged elites,
for resisting external powers and, in general, for swift action.
The statist values that accompany paternalist populism require not only the enhanced
capability of intervention but also an internal homogenization of the state, where education,
health care, the judiciary, public information, sport and, often, religious affairs are coordinated
and centralised. In line with the paternalistic elements, the interest of the governments, from
Brazil to Poland, turned to history textbooks. Even in the United States, where the right
traditionally championed school autonomy, efforts have been made by state governments to
change curricula in a more conservative and nationalistic direction.
The growing relevance of culture wars in world politics further facilitated the
international diffusion of paternalist aspects. In 2021 Viktor Orbán banned education on
sexual minorities in schools. In 2002 Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, followed suit with
the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and went even further with the “Stop WOKE” bill, forbidding the
inclusion of various topics in school and university curricula. A couple of months later, in
2023, Vladimir Putin introduced a decree according to which the government’s obligations

11
 include the protection of traditional family values, especially concerning heterosexual
marriage, and the enforcement of traditional Russian spirituality and morality in the education
of children. Additionally, the state must protect the “historical truth” and defend the society
against “external ideological and value expansion and destructive information and
psychological impact” (Russia Posts English 2013).
The statist turn of the American right is significant because, until recently,
individualism and pro-market orientation kept it ideologically isolated from illiberals
elsewhere. Even Trump used little collectivistic or communitarian rhetoric. But some recent
theoretical advances narrowed the gap between the United States and the rest of the world.
Leading conservative academics such as Adrian Vermeule (2020), Patrick Deneen (2018),
Rod Dreher (2021) and others developed a new, more communitarian and more explicitly
illiberal approach. The message of these thinkers is that conservatives should no longer be
afraid of using state power for implementing their principles (Halmai 2021; Garcia-Holgado
and Perez-Linan 2021).

Conclusions

Paraphrasing Tolstoy, one is tempted to say that all liberal democracies are alike, but every
autocratic initiative is autocratic in its own way. This asymmetry comes from the fact that
liberal democracy is a relatively recent, barely a century old, innovation in need of a generic
legitimization. Individual autocracies, on the other hand, do not need to provide legitimacy for
all other autocracies, they only need to legitimise their own rule. And specific justifications
can rest on the references to the charisma of the leader or on the unique challenges faced by
the country. In general, authoritarian practices can exist without an unequivocally
authoritarian rhetoric.
But while the asymmetry exists, there are similarities in the ideological discourse of
autocratic politicians across various regions of the world, as demonstrated above. Some part
of the common platform is neatly summarized by David Lewis (2021, 19):

“The most fundamental common theme is a rejection of the tenets of liberalism (defined
in all sorts of different ways) and the assertion of national or civilizational spaces that
deny the application of universal norms. So, in that sense, it is a spatial and anti-
universalist movement, aimed at ‘de-spatialising’, normative institutions—the European
Union, transnational civil society and so forth. A second common feature is the attempt
to separate democracy from liberalism—we can call this illiberal democracy or

12
 democratic authoritarianism, but in each case an illiberal political order denies the
validity of political pluralism, but still claims a popular mandate from society.”

Today’s autocratizers are majoritarian, they see the West in decline, and they consider
political correctness and judicial activism as anti-democratic. Accordingly, their favourite
enemies are human rights advocates, journalists, international finance, academic elites,
judges, cosmopolitan citizens and, occasionally, great powers. Their rhetoric rarely explicitly
denigrates freedom or elections, and it even alleges that the ambition is to reset the linkage
between the demands of ‘real people’ and the government, a linkage broken by the
radicalized liberal social elites. They are particularly in favour of restoring national
sovereignty that was undermined by the liberal world order or by some specific great powers,
and in this regard, they often employ anti-colonial discourse. The freedom-centred argument,
however, is rarely followed up in the domestic arena where the same forces tend to restrict
media freedom, regulate historical memory and enforce a specific cultural script.
Behind the universalism of the international elites autocratizers find utopianism,
‘oikophobia’ (Scruton 2006) or the dislike of one’s own culture and national community and
a rejection of the natural (often God-given) order. The represented community is projected to
be homogenous in essential political and cultural aspects. It is also claimed to be victimized
by shadowy and typically foreign or foreign-hearted actors, leading to an imminent crisis that
legitimizes harsh treatment of the nation’s enemies, whether they are physically located
inside or outside the national community.
The various surveyed ideational modules do not glue together into a single
authoritarian ideology. The ideological discourses of autocratizers converge, ironically,
exactly in not explicitly endorsing authoritarian governance. They provide justification for
measures that violate pluralism, limited government and the equality of citizens, and they
mobilize supporters against dissenting groups and individuals, but they do not elevate an
entire system of such measures above democracy. Most autocratizer politicians are not as
forthright as Orbán and Putin who both argued that liberalism is obsolete and pernicious
(Barber et al. 2019), and not even these two embrace a comprehensively authoritarian
worldview.
Populist argumentation is definitely more common than during previous waves of
autocratization, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to justify the restrictions on civil
liberties and fair competition. The equation of populism with illiberalism, autocratization and,
especially, authoritarianism is definitely wrong. Furthermore, paternalist populism, the most
relevant version of populism, differs from ideal-typical populism by redefining the popular
will as one that is jointly determined by the people and the state, with the latter having a
major role in guiding the former.

13
 In an important recent piece, Marlene Laruelle (2022) pointed to right-wing
conservative ideas that form the basis of illiberalism, albeit in an ‘updated’ and distorted form,
and in combination with anti-minority and anti-institutionalist sentiments. Similarly, Ruzha
Smilova (2021) defined ‘democratic illiberalism’ with the features of ethno-nationalist anti-
individualism, anti-liberalism, anti-globalism, unrestrained popular sovereignty, and anti-
pluralism. They both argued that this ‘blueprint’ is an increasingly successful rival to the
liberal democratic model. Indeed, regimes characterized by the rule of strongmen, alignment
with traditional moral values, enhanced homogeneity and national pride have more appeal
than any time since the Second World War.
The discussion of various discursive strategies of autocratizers above revealed that the
scope of right-wing illiberalism, described by Laruelle and Smilova, is wider than that of
populism, but it is still not comprehensive. The task of further research is to provide us with
a typology of various illiberal ideas and to study systematically their relationships to the
ongoing de-democratization.
Without any doubt, the earlier dominance of the liberal democratic model was closely
tied to its ability to deliver economic growth, social mobility and security. But restoring the
competitiveness of liberal democracy requires both improved performance and ideological
fine-tuning. The latter needs to reckon with the fact that in the world of ideas there exists a
still fragmented but increasingly robust illiberal alternative.

14
References

Alarcón, Benigno, Angel E. Alvarez and Manuel Hidalgo. 2016. “Can Democracy Win in
Venezuela?”, Journal of Democracy 27 (2) 20–34.

Albertazzi, Daniele. 2022. “On the Radical and Extreme Right in Italy and Switzerland.” In
Conversations on Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 Scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 190–
3. Washington D.C.: George Washington University.

Barber, Lionel, Henry Foy, and Alex Barker. 2019. “Vladimir Putin Says Liberalism Has
‘Become Obsolete’”, Financial Times, June 28, 2019. https://www.ft.com/content/670039ec-
98f3-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36.

Blokker, Paul. 2021. “Populism and Illiberalism.” In Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism,

edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz and Stephen Holmes, 261–79. London: Routledge.

Boese, Vanessa A., Nazifa Alizada, Martin Lundstedt, Kelly Morrison, Natalia Natsika, Yuko
Sato, Hugo Tai, and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2022. “Autocratization Changing Nature? Democracy
Report 2022.” Varieties of Democracy Institute.

Bourchier, David. 2015. Illiberal Democracy in Indonesia: The Ideology of the Family State.
London: Routledge.

Bourchier, David M. 2019. “Two Decades of Ideological Contestation in Indonesia: From

Democratic Cosmopolitanism to Religious Nationalism.” Journal of Contemporary Asia 49
(5): 713–33.

Chaguaceda, Armando. 2021. “On Democratic Decay in Latin America.” In Conversations on

Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 Scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 158–63. Washington
D.C.: George Washington University.

Chang, Wen-Chen. 2021. “Asian Values, Confucianism, and Liberal Constitutions.” In

Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen
Holmes, 82–93. London: Routledge.

Cianetti, Licia, James Dawson, and Sean Hanley. 2018. “Rethinking ‘Democratic Backsliding’
in Central and Eastern Europe — Looking Beyond Hungary and Poland.” East European
Politics 34 (3): 243–56.Corrales, Javier, 2020. “Democratic Backsliding through Electoral
Irregularities: The Case of Venezuela.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean
Studies 109: 41–65.

Davis, Michael C. 1998. “Constitutionalism and Political Culture: The Debate Over Human
Rights and Asian Values.” Harvard Human Rights Journal 11: 109–48.

15
 Dawson, James, and Sean Hanley. 2016. “The Fading Mirage of the ‘Liberal Consensus:’
What’s Wrong with East-Central Europe?” Journal of Democracy 27 (1): 20–34.

de la Torre, Carlos. 2010. Populist Seduction in Latin America. Athens: Ohio University Press.

Deneen, Patrick J. 2018. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Dietze, Gabriele, and Julia Roth. 2020. “Right-Wing Populism and Gender: A Preliminary
Cartography of an Emergent Field of Research.” In Right-Wing Populism and Gender:
European Perspectives and Beyond, edited by Gabriele Dietze and Julia Roth, 7–22. Bielefeld:
Transcript Verlag.

Dreher, Rod. 2021. “What Conservatives Must Learn from Orbán’s Hungary.” National
Conservatism Conference II, Orlando, FL.

Enyedi, Zsolt. 2020. “Right-Wing Authoritarian Innovations in Central and Eastern

Europe.” East European Politics 36 (3): 363–77.

Enyedi, Zsolt. 2023. “Illiberal Conservatism, Civilizationalist Ethnocentrism, and Paternalist

Populism in Orbán’s Hungary.” DI Working Papers 2023/03.

Fassin, Eric. 2014. “Same-Sex Marriage, Nation, and Race: French Political Logics and
Rhetorics.” Contemporary French civilization 39 (3): 281–301.

Freeden, Michael. 1996. “The Family of Liberalisms: A Morphological Analysis.” In The

Liberal Political Tradition: Contemporary Reappraisals, edited by James Meadowcroft, 14–
39. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Freeden, Michael. 2003. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Freeden, Michael. 2017. “After the Brexit Referendum: Revisiting Populism as an Ideology.”
Journal of Political Ideologies 22 (1): 1–11.

Frick, Marie-Luisa. 2021. “Illiberalism and Human Rights.” In Routledge Handbook of

Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, 861–77. London:
Routledge.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2019. Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ganga, Paula. 2021. “Economic Consequences of Illiberalism in Eastern Europe.” In

Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen
Holmes, 691–710. London: Routledge.

Ganguly, Šumit. 2020. “An illiberal India?” Journal of Democracy 31 (1): 193–202.

16
Garcia-Holgado, Benjamin, and Anibal Perez-Linan. 2021. “The Weaknesses of Illiberal
Regimes.” In Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and
Stephen Holmes, 925–38. London: Routledge.

Garrido, Marco. 2022. “Illiberalism in the Philippines.” In Conversations on Illiberalism:

Interviews with 50 Scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 207–10. Washington D.C.: George
Washington University.

Ghai, Yash. 2000. “Human Rights and Governance: The Asia Debate.” Asia-Pacific Journal on
Human Rights and the Law 1(1): 9–52.

Ginsburg, Tom. 2021. “Asia’s Illiberal Governments.” In Routledge Handbook of

Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, 713–24. London:
Routledge.

Gray, Phillip W. 2021. “On the Alt-Right Agenda and Intellectual Genealogy.” In
Conversations on Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 Scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 100–
6. Washington D.C.: George Washington University.

Halmai, Gábor 2021. “Illiberalism in East-Central Europe.” In Routledge Handbook of

Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, 813–21. London:
Routledge.

Ikenberry, John. G. 2014. “The Illusion of Geopolitics: The Enduring Power of the Liberal
Order.” Foreign Affairs 93(3): 80–90.

Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2022. “On India’s Growing National-Populism.” In Conversations on

Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 48–51. Washington
D.C.: George Washington University.

Jamin, Jérôme. 2021. “On American Illiberal Democracy.” In Conversations on Illiberalism:

Interviews with 50 scholars, Edited by Marlene Laruelle, 40–7. Washington D.C.: George
Washington University.

Jones, Martin, Kanishka Jayasuriya, Daniel A. Bell, and Martin Jones. 1995. “Towards a Model
of Illiberal Democracy.” In Towards Illiberal Democracy in Pacific Asia, edited by Daniel A.
Bell, David Brown, Kanishka Jayasuriya, and David Martin Jones, 163–7. New York: St.
Martin’s Press.

Kauth, Jasper Theodor, and Desmond King. 2020. “Illiberalism.” European Journal of
Sociology/ Archives Européennes de Sociologie 61 (3): 365–405.

Lánczi, András. 2015. Political Realism and Wisdom. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lánczi, András. 2018. “The Renewed Social Contract–Hungary’s Elections, 2018.” Hungarian
Review 9

17
 (3).http://www.hungarianreview.com/article/20180525_the_renewed_social_contract_hung
ary_s_elections_2018.

Landau, David. 2021. “The Myth of the Illiberal Democratic Constitution.” In Routledge
Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, 425–41.
London: Routledge.

Laruelle, Marlene. 2022. “Illiberalism: a conceptual introduction.” East European

Politics 38(2): 303–27.

Lewis, David. 2022. “On Carl Schmitt and Russian Conservatism.” In Conversations on
Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 Scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle 13–9. Washington D.C.:
George Washington University.

Lewis, David G. 2020. Russia’s New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Luce, Edward. 2017. The Retreat of Western Liberalism. New York: Abacus.

Lührmann, Anna and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2019. “A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here:
What Is New about It?” Democratization 26 (7): 1095–113.

Lührmann, Anna, Nils Düpont, Masaaki Higashijima, Yaman Berker Kavasoglu, Kyle L.
Marquardt, Michael Bernhard, Holger Döring, Allen Hicken, Melis Laebens, Staffan I.
Lindberg, Juraj Medzihorsky et al. 2020. Codebook Varieties of Party Identity and
Organization (V–Party) V1. Varieties of Democracy (V–Dem) Project.

Maerz, Seraphine F., Anna Lührmann, Sebastian Hellmeier, Sandra Grahn and Staffan I.
Lindberg. 2020. “State of the World 2019: Autocratization Surges – Resistance Grows.”
Democratization 27 (6): 909–27.

Maerz, Seraphine F., Amanda Edgell, Matthew C. Wilson, Sebastian Hellmeier, and Staffan
I. Lindberg. 2021. “A Framework for Understanding Regime Transformation: Introducing the
ERT Dataset.” V-Dem Working Paper 113.

Mafei, Rafael Rabelo Quieroz, Thomas Bustamante, and Emilio Peluso Neder Meyer. 2021.
“From Antiestablishmentarism to Bolsonarism.” In Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism,
edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, 778–96. London: Routledge.

Mahbubani, Kishore. 1992. “The West and the Rest.” The National Interest 28: 3–12.

Mancini, Susanna, and Nausica Palazzo. 2021. “The Body of the Nation: Illiberalism and
Gender.” In Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and
Stephen Holmes, 403–22. London: Routledge.

Moffitt, Benjamin. 2016. The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and
Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

18
Mudhoffir, Abdil Mughis and Vedi R. Hadiz. 2021. “Indonesia’s ‘Third-wave” Democratic
Model?” In Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and
Stephen Holmes, 753–64. London: Routledge.

Pető, Andrea. 2021. “Gender and Illiberalism.” In Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism,

edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, 313–25. London: Routledge.

Rüland, Jürgen 2022. “On Illiberalism in South East Asia.” In Conversations on Illiberalism:
Interviews with 50 Scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 144–50. Washington D.C.: George
Washington University.

Russia Posts English. 2023. “Putin has made changes to the foundations of the state cultural
policy. Now its tasks include “protecting society from external ideological and value
expansion””, Russia Posts English, January 25, 2023.
https://news.russia.postsen.com/news/180415.html.

Sajó, András, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes. 2021. “Preface.” In Routledge Handbook of
Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, xxi-xxv. London:
Routledge.

Scheppele, Kim Lane. 2019. “The Opportunism of Populists and the Defense of
Constitutional Liberalism.” German Law Journal 20 (3): 314–31.

Scruton, Roger. 2006. England and the Need for Nations. London: Civitas, Institute for the
Study of Civil Society.

Shany, Yuval and Mordechai Kremnitzer. 2022. “On Democracy in Israel.” In Conversations
on Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 Scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 201–6. Washington
D.C.: George Washington University.

Smilova, Ruzha. 2021. “The Ideational Core of Democratic Illiberalism.” In Routledge

Handbook of Illiberalism, edited by András Sajó, Renáta Uitz, and Stephen Holmes, 177–
202. London: Routledge.

Taspinar, Omer 2014. “The End of the Turkish Model.” Survival 56 (2): 49–64.

Tucker, Noah 2022. “On Jihadist Ideology and European Populism.” In Conversations on
Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 Scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 20–5. Washington D.C.:
George Washington University.

Varshney, Ashutosh. 2019. “Modi Consolidates Power: Electoral Vibrancy, Mounting Liberal
Deficits.” Journal of Democracy 30 (4): 63–77.

Vermeule, Adrian. 2020. “Beyond Originalism.” The Atlantic, March 31, 2020.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-
constitutionalism/609037/

19
 Yatsyk, Alexandra and Andrey Makarychev. 2022. “On Illiberal Biopolitics.” In Conversations
on Illiberalism: Interviews with 50 Scholars, edited by Marlene Laruelle, 52–6. Washington
D.C.: George Washington University.

20
Notes

21
 Contact Us Follow Us
[email protected] Twitter.com/AuthlibEU
www.authlib.eu Facebook.com/AuthlibEU
Youtube.com/@AuthlibEU

22